Code First's Mission To Teach Young Women To Code

Code First: Girls has launched its 2020 campaign, to teach 20,000 young women how to code for free by the end of 2020. Code First: Girls is a UK-based not-for-profit social enterprise that works exclusively with women to develop coding skills.

Code First: Girls was founded by Alice Bentinck and Matthew Clifford after they recognized a lack of female applications for their pre-seed investment program, Entrepreneur First or EF.

According to Code First: Girls, its research showed that one of the biggest barriers to women entering the tech industry in the UK is education.

The company said that its 2020 campaign is designed to address the critical gap in the UK's job market by providing women with skills that are critical to the digital economy.

Code First: Girls is now working with campaign partners and backers from leading employers, including KKR and OVH, to train young women at the start of their careers from across the UK and Ireland how to code.

To achieve this goal, Code First: Girls has opened a 25,000 British pounds crowdfunding campaign.

The program will offer training support to employees from the partner companies with the opportunity to train their young female staff as well as gift free coding courses on the partner's behalf to young women at other charitable institutions.

In addition to the training, Code First: Girls will build a community platform to support the course alumnae so that the young women can learn from and support each other.

It will also give the campaigns' top tier partners access to a pool of 20,000 young women who have completed the coding course and want to explore career opportunities in tech and digital.

The share of women in the U.K. technology sector has fallen from 33 percent in 2002 to 27 percent today.

Code First: Girls noted that with only 3,775 women registered by the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service to take a consumer science degree in 2016 and the overall tech talent pipeline potentially further stressed under Brexit, it hopes to encourage career age women to pursue careers in tech.